New Study Says Female Online Daters Peak at 18. Is This for Real?

Friday, September 21, 2018

When it comes to dating, men and women have different problems. Men worry that women only want them for their dough, and women worry that men don't want them after a certain age. Well, it turns out that the latter is actually true.

A new study published in the journal, Science Advances, found that the desirability of female online daters peaked at 18! Meanwhile, men's desirability peaked at 50.

What?!?

The researchers studied the online dating messages of almost 200,000 heterosexual people, and their findings echoed one from Okcupid that was published in 2010. Okcupid stated that men who were 22-30 preferred to date women younger than them, so you betcha that included teenagers...

“The age gradient for women definitely surprised us — both in terms of the fact that it steadily declined from the time women were 18 to the time they were 65, and also how steep it was,” Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an author of the study, said, according to the New York Times.

Okcupid's study found that as men get older, their age preferences for women stayed the same, widening the gap. Unfortunately, that means for older women, it's true that their dating pool lessens as their male peers seek youth, which evolutionary biologists believe suggests fertility.

So all those movies that joke about first wives getting annoyed that their ex-husbands have a woman half his age are actually steeped in reality....I guess you only have to look at Donald Trump, Kelsey Grammar, Larry King, or any man who's married multiple times to see this actually happens IRL.

According to the new study, men care about physical attractiveness first. Unlike women, they don't have a strong interest in a mate's earning potential or power. Basically, women want intelligence and success. Men want youth and beauty.

Now the study focused on desire, not actually what people could get or the chemistry that can develop between two daters. So older women and poor men still have a chance of love, that is until their settling partner's aspirations luck out.